Engaged employees add value to any organization. This can help the single employee and the entire business on its own. Get it right, and the rewards on offer are significant: efficiency, good quality of service, and a decrease in employee turnover, as well as issues linked with workers’ illnesses and absence. This is backed by volumes of empirical evidence, especially from Gallup studies, which are instrumental in showing the significance of employee involvement.
However, even with the numerous studies, only 15% of employees around the world are considered fully engaged by Gallup. However, only human resources can do something about it. As traditionally, HR fulfilled an intermediary function of the management and the workers.
Therefore, human resource management can serve as an intermediary through which management will help, support, and measure employees’ commitment to their organization. HR is also relevant in driving the organizational culture that aligns directly with the organization’s leaders, goals, and employees. Therefore, in relation to enhancing staff involvement, Human resource management have a critical share. Hereafter, this post delves into a close examination of employee engagement and HR’s contribution to it.
The Link Between HR Management and Employee Engagement
Every stakeholder, leader, or manager ought to take employee engagement as one of his core responsibilities in the organization. Nonetheless, outsource Human resource management hold responsibility for various areas that have direct impacts on employee engagement. These are among the important responsibilities that HR performs as a key spring responsible for employee involvement in all profit-making firms.
First and foremost, organizations should know how to engage their employees in order to derive maximum output. Your organization lives on its workforce, which is a fact one cannot escape. It is what keeps everything together, and if these people are not engaged, it will impact pretty much any area of your business.
However, defining employee engagement is quite wide and complicated. In essence, it refers to how satisfied, engaged, and productive an employee feels towards their job.
Engagement of employees is how many times you involve them in employee newsletters and other issues related to employees’ communication, company policies, and even HR directives. Why, then, does all of this matter?
By assessing, investing in, and working to improve this data, you can:
Increase productivity and profitability: Disengaged workers are far worse than engaged ones. One report by Connected Culture suggests that employees who frequently communicate are more productive. Thus, it is common to observe highly engaged business units with a corresponding turnover of 43% and profitability of 23%.
Boost levels of innovation and creativity: Through a vibrant and committed environment, innovation may thrive. Doing so is essentially setting the stage for something truly remarkable.
Adapt better customer service: For this reason, involved workers are happier when it comes to the task they deliver resulting in more personal services offered to consumers. Gallup continues its report by stating that a 10% greater customer rating and an eighteen percent sales increase are possible for well-engaged institutions. For example, engaging in one of your marketing efforts may distinguish your business from others, particularly if you have a customer-facing, frontline organization.
Minimize staff turnover: This is because high employee engagement equates with high employee satisfaction, which ultimately leads to increased retention, thereby lowering turnovers. However, researchers’ findings show that employees are 90 percent less likely to quit their jobs when they are totally involved at work.
Strategies for Building a Positive Work Culture
The corporate orchestra’s conductor is a good human resource manager. It aligns every department, team, and person with the organization’s goals. For instance, it serves as an ‘audition’ room in which only the most talented players and individuals are recruited into the band.
An employee engagement strategy is a documenting, step-by-step guideline on how an employer keeps their workers involved in matters concerning them.
In this regard, an employee’s engagement strategy fosters a supportive environment in which voluntariness easily grows. This is a way that an organization could enhance the likelihood of their employees forming an emotional bond with it. One notable thing is that your intended actions determine the total budget of the company and its overall size.
Effective Communication Channels and Feedback Loops
The core of the drive of employee engagement in the workplace always had been the key factor of any business success and always would have been it, but communication.
The ability of organizations to develop an environment where communication can flow freely between managers, employees, and other stakeholders will ensure that the workforce is involved. Hence, Human resource management outsourcing professionals must try to create a conducive environment that will allow efficient interpersonal exchanges.
Through close observation of employee interactions within different departments. HRS will have an opportunity to curb emerging problems within the company setup. It is going to make sure that every employee feels free to speak out about issues, opinions, or ideas without any intimidation.
In addition, HR must ensure that every employee is familiar with means of communication such as email, slack, zoom, team, phone calls, text messaging, or face-to-face meetings.
Furthermore, HR should establish a working environment in which every employee feels safe to express their views freely and without fear. This entails promoting a spirit of feedback among employees such that managers should be able to give their workers suggestions that may improve their work.
Such kind of communication contributes to the creation of trust between workers and their superiors as well as makes employees feel more inspired and motivated.
Lastly, HR should facilitate timely and effective communication. Employees who do not get a timely response to their queries tend to become disengaged. This is because HR should follow communications processes in order to allow all employees to know that they have been heard.
Professional Development and Training Programs
One popular proclamation states that ‘People do not leave their jobs; people leave their managers.’’ Though slightly inaccurate, it does hit home.
This is because it is managers who are in a position to lead and appraise daily assignments by the workers. Therefore, if managers are not involved in any new engagement strategy, they cannot expect high employee engagement levels.
The most effective approach involves exposing managers to some case studies about how to engage employees. This entails demonstration and coaching so that desired actions can be manifested. Here are a few pointers for HR professionals to train managers:
- Encourage people to appreciate well-done jobs.
- Team building and improved peer relationships.
- Practicing empathy-based leadership.
- The relevance of taking advice and opinions from employees.
- Dealing with poor employee performance.
Recognition and Rewards Programs
According to a report done by Achieves Workforce Institute, the engagement of an employee increases by approximately 40%. After praising them for their performance, whereas job commitment is higher by about 25%.
It leads employees to form some emotional bonding with the company they work for when it shows that it appreciates them. Engaged employees differ from simply satisfied ones by this connection.
Can you also recognize their achievements that need to be more work-related? For instance, celebrate someone from Marketing who has completed the Marathon challenge. Acknowledge one from Accounts on giving birth to her first child, and acknowledge another from Finance who has volunteered for a litter clean-up exercise.
These small actions will contribute much to the creation company culture of acknowledgement for work done in any place.
Measuring and Analyzing Employee Engagement
In every workplace setup, Human resource management professionals must always take into consideration the ROI associated with every employee engagement initiative. The changes would only be possible to judge based on their effects on the level of engagement by understanding them first. Employee Engagement Tools Comes along here.
Employee engagement surveys offer the best method for measuring engagement levels. These are popular employee engagement surveys since they measure the level of engagement by focusing on strengths and weaknesses.
As such, HR professionals and leaders get a good indication of what they should work on improving.
Such surveys produce data and insights that are important in pointing out patterns that led to an increase in positive employee engagement in the organization.
It is important to conduct a regular staff survey seeking employee opinions about a wide range of matters that includes engagement and other things. Similarly, surveys can offer longitudinal information on which to measure the effectiveness of engagement efforts against peers or rivals.
There has been a significant association between employee engagement and recruitment, retention, absenteeism, absenteeism, and sickness rates. This information is ordinarily compiled in the HR and indicates whether employee engagement is healthy in the business. A watchful eye of HR on such statistics requires timely reporting to management. About progress as well as emerging trends that may be an indicator of an upshot problem.
Conclusion
Human resource management professionals are key in supporting employee engagement programs, leading to an engaging workplace for everyone. Open communication, customized staff training plans, acknowledging and rewarding individual efforts, fostering balanced private/public life at work. And others are what HR does for employees to unlock their true potential.
The result? Success leads to a hardworking, committed, and efficient workforce geared towards the growth of the company. Thus, HR should spearhead the employee engagement drive, and your company will be on another level in this digital era.